ABSTRACT

This study reports on Fo peak alignment and vowel duration data from an acoustic study of Belgrade Serbian and Zagreb Croatian (henceforth Belgrade and Zagreb, respectively). The goal of this study is to establish the prosodic differences between the two dialects and explore the effects of pragmatic narrow focus on the realization of vowel length and peak alignment. As was indicated briefly above, the results show first that these two dialects belong to different prosodic types, thus confirming earlier analyses. Second, in both dialects vowel lengthening and F0 retraction are the main correlates of narrow focus, indicating some cross-varietal (and cross-linguistic in comparison with other languages) similarities in the expression of narrow focus. Finally, the examination of the peak alignment and vowel lengthening effects of narrow focus reveals a difference between the two dialects that corresponds to the difference between lexically defined pitch-accent and vowel length contrasts vs. pragmatically defined pitch-accent contrast (Le., lack of lexical pitch-accent and vowellength contrasts). Belgrade exhibits a system of lexical pitch and vowel length contrasts, and narrow focus affects these cues by enhancing22 or exaggerating the contrast rather than just by preserving the existing contrast; Zagreb lacks lexical pitch and some speakers also lack a vowel length contrast. Narrow focus

in Two Dialects ofCroatian in Zagreb is expressed through a uniform enhancement of the stressed syllable (through vowel lengthening and peak retraction). These results suggest that the role of pragmatic narrow focus is not simply a monotonic enhancement of the acoustic cues to prosody but is conditioned by functional demands such as the enhancement of a lexical contrast. Pragmatic narrow focus can, thus, be seen as the expanded expression of phonemic contrast through hyperarticulation, whereas the pragmatic broad focus can be seen as hypospeech driven by the economy and potential undershoot of contrasts (Lindblom, 1990; de Jong 1995, 2000).